Sporadic commentary on the telecoms and IT market in Latvia and the Baltic States.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Lattelekom prepares to serve God (Latvian-size) as a customer

Lattelekom has purchased some SiemensDWDM equipment and will be installing it on its backbone network by mid-year. According to my source, this allows a throughput of 40 simultaneous 10 Gigabit data flows per optical strand. That is like 0.4 Terabit, and there are lots of strands in an optical cable. So I figure this is enough data capacity for Dieviņš, the kind little Latvian god who rides his horse without disturbing a tender blossom (fire and brimstone on a Judeo-Christian scale is a bandwidth hog). Anyway, the kind of capacity Lattelekom is putting on its carrier and, possibly, metro networks is enough for the data transmission needs of a small universe and its god. Like Dieviņš, who, after all, can offer around a million Latvian folksongs or dainas for downloading. Beat that iTunes!But that is probably not what it will be used for, it is going to be there for the high capacity multimedia services the network will carry when Lattelekom a) finally kicks up the default DSL speed to around 10 Mps and starts pushing lots of TV, including customer-created content and HiDef channels down its IPTV network.The Siemens equipment was purchased jointly with the half-mother TeliaSonera, which is also upgrading its backbone.Now one just has to watch for Skandinieki, the Latvian pagan folk music group to be singing outside Lattelekom offices to know that Dieviņš has signed up as an enterprise data customer. And then another network upgrade will be necessary...:)